Delicate Arch by John Delaney

$21.99

 

“As recognized by the founders of the National Park Service from the beginning, appreciation of the national parks is vital to their protection. Although others have written countless words about our treasured lands, few have had the power to convey their wonder as succinctly as John Delaney in the place-based poems of Delicate Arch. Intriguing, selected facts and revealing photographs add other layers of meaning to the poet’s meditations on time and the essence of places. Simultaneously whimsical and emotional, the crisp verses from this wanderer to remote locations awaken our imagination and curiosity, offering us a different way of appreciating nature’s gifts.”

–Q.T. Luong, recipient of the National Parks Conservation Association’s Robin W. Winks Award for Enhancing Public Understanding of National Parks, photographer/author of Treasured Lands: A Photographic Odyssey through America’s National Parks (2016, 2019)

 

“Delicate Arch is a gift from the awareness of a poet who takes his duty to witness seriously, who stands back a bit from his own inspired observance and lets water, magma, and root echo throughout these carefully tuned lines. The poems here inform while singing. They inform us the readers, that is, participants, creating with us an internal guidebook. The guidance we need is to be found in the rhythm of John Delaney‘s true heart. ‘The point of a journey is its round trip.’ On that trip we take with him our recognition of the depth of this country’s beauty is reawakened.”

–Michael Daley, publisher of Empty Bowl, author of Born With (2020), his fifth book of poems

 

 

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Description

Delicate Arch

by John Delaney

978-1-64662-790-5

2022

$21.99, Full-length, paper; includes 23 pages of color photographs

John retired after 35 years in the Dept. of Rare Books and Special Collections of Princeton University Library, where he was head of manuscripts processing and then, for his last 15 years, curator of historic maps. He has written a number of works on cartography, including Strait Through: Magellan to Cook and the Pacific; First X, Then Y, Now Z: An Introduction to Landmark Thematic Maps; and Nova Caesarea: A Cartographic Record of the Garden State, 1666-1888. These have extensive website versions. He has written poems for most of his life, and, in the 1970s, he attended the Writing Program of Syracuse University, where his mentors were poets W. D. Snodgrass and Philip Booth. No doubt, in subtle ways, they have bookended his approach to poems. His Waypoints, a collection of place poems, appeared in 2017; Twenty Questions, a chapbook, was published in 2019. John has traveled widely, preferring remote, natural settings, and is addicted to kayaking and hiking. He makes his home in Port Townsend, Washington.

A Note About this Book:

Much of Delicate Arch is the result of a 6,000-mile trip my wife and I took in the fall of 2019, when we visited many national parks and monuments. Previous and subsequent journeys have expanded its scope. My first experience of the national parks occurred over sixty years ago during a summer road trip with my mother and three sisters. I never forgot that first view of the Grand Canyon. The immensity of Time, the diversity of Nature, Man’s capacity for wonder—in our national parks and monuments you experience that trinity for yourself. It is spiritual and holy in the truest sense. I thought that poems fostered by photographs was the best means for me to convey my own experiences. Reader, if you have not yet had the adventure, this book is an invitation to do so. If you have, then your own memories of these places will find resonance here. Seeing is believing.

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